Comparing narratives of animal care: Afghanistan vs. Ukraine

At the time that Russia’s war in Ukraine began, I was researching the comparative treatment of humans and nonhumans during the evacuation of Kabul. I was therefore particularly interested in the way that animals figured in media coverage of Ukraine. And animals did figure— in fact, they were featured in multiple photosets and posts that not only characterized animals as refugees, but also centered the love and dedication of human refugees who transported their pets to safety. Take, for example, several March 2022 photo stories: one from The Atlantic, entitled “Pets Can Be Refugees, Too,” one from the Guardian, entitled, “Pets of war: Ukrainians take comfort from their animals as they flee the conflict,” and one from AP News, entitled “Ukrainians fleeing war ‘can’t leave’ pets behind.” These stories, and others like them, foreground the devotion of human Ukrainian refugees to their pets, often in the form of photos showing refugees who have carried their dogs and cats over long distances in order to find shelter. One feel-good story that was widely circulated concerned in English newspapers concerned a Ukrainian woman who carried her elderly German shepherd on her shoulders for ten miles.

Immense international efforts were made to support Ukrainian pets, from the waiving of legal entrance requirements for refugee pets to outpourings of donations through charitable organizations. The scholar Kristin Sandvik has provided a substantial accounting of these efforts in her work on Ukraine and “pet exceptionalism,” in a series of blog posts and in an article for International Migration. As of June 2023, international animal rescue groups continue to work in Ukraine in order to protect and evacuate animals left behind.

Sandvik notes that the “pet exceptionalism” on display in Ukraine must be understood in the context of the larger exceptionalism that has characterized Western attitudes towards Ukraine, particularly in the early days of the war. Human Ukrainian refugees were welcomed and endowed with unprecedented privileges in Western Europe, even as Syrian, Afghan, and other non-white refugees remained unwelcome and subject to immense legal barriers. In one sense, the narrative of Ukrainian pet devotion might be seen as a form of justification for the privileged treatment of Ukrainians: Ukrainians deserve privileged treatment because they demonstrate “appropriate” care for animals, which aligns them with Eurocentric ideologies of the human. I am interested in exploring this idea further, because such a justification rests upon the non-obvious assumption that pet love has, in fact, come to comprise an important part of the construction of humanness. At the same time, it’s also clear to me that Ukrainian pet devotion does not pre-exist the privileged treatment of Ukrainians in any clear way; rather, the (visible, legible) characteristic of Ukrainian pet devotion emerges as part of the process that privileges Ukrainian refugees. In order to unpack this further, I want to discuss two pet incidents that I witnessed through my involvement in and following the August 2021 evacuation of Kabul.

The first of these incidents involves a very dear friend of mine who, during the chaotic weeks leading up to the US withdrawal, was forced to flee his home with his family without the pet cat that he had raised from a kitten, as his family felt that their only chance of safety was to board an American evacuation flight. My friend’s experience of the following days was brutal and immensely traumatic. However, the sole moment at which he displayed the full emotional weight of this experience, and the only time that I have ever known him to swear in any language, was when mourning the loss of his cat and lashing out at the Taliban soldiers who were responsible for their separation.

The second incident involves a former student of mine who was forced into hiding after the U.S. withdrawal due to the former prominence of her father as an anti-Taliban political analyst. I had attempted to arrange her family’s evacuation through an organization that was supporting Afghan journalists. However, it was well-known at that point that no evacuation flights were allowing animals. My student— a young woman with a lot of experience of stress and fear— became nearly hysterical when I told her that her pet cat would not be allowed on the flight. She insisted that she would refuse to board the flight if she could not bring her cat with her, and that she would remain in Afghanistan while the rest of her family left.

I offer these anecdotes in order to highlight several important elements: first, in contrast to the narrative that portrays Afghans as incapable of “appropriate” care for animals, many Afghan refugees feel the same affective attachment to their pets as Ukrainians. Second, Afghan pets without Western intercessors (such as the high-profile animal rescuer Pen Farthing) are not extended the same exceptional privileges as Ukrainian animals, nor is Afghan care for pets understood as having the same weight and importance as Ukrainian care for pets. One justification offered for pet exceptionalism during the Ukraine crisis, as Sandvik notes, was that companion animals would “lessen trauma and enhance well-being” for “distressed refugees.” However, Afghan refugees are not figured as distressed in the same way as Ukrainian refugees— I suspect because trauma is understood as the normal context of Afghan being, though the reaction that Jennifer Fluri and Rachel Lehr (2017 x) record to depictions of Afghan daily life (“I never thought of them [Afghans] as human before!”) perhaps also applies. Third, the enormously greater logistical challenges, legal struggles, and uncertainty that Afghan refugees face in reaching safety often make animal accompaniment impossible or, in fact, unethical. Afghan refugees often face waits of several years in refugee processing centers (including in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, but also when claiming asylum in the United Kingdom) or in third countries (like Pakistan and Iran) where their standard of living is extremely low; they may therefore be willing to risk their own comfort and safety on the uncertain chance of obtaining resettlement, but be unwilling or unable to ask an animal to endure the same. (Would my friend’s family be able to board an American evacuation flight (where animals would not be allowed)? Would they be housed in a refugee processing center for several years, even if they did? Would they ever, in fact, be resettled in the US? Would they survive the evacuation?)

If we compare Afghan and Ukrainian refugee experiences, it becomes clear that the narrative of exceptional Ukrainian pet devotion (“Ukrainians ‘can’t leave’ pets behind”) is one that is produced by both the systemic smoothing of Ukrainian migration and the formal validation of Ukrainian affective capacity.

The significance of this issue for my larger project lies primarily in the role that we see pet love playing in the determination of humanness. This is a more complex point that it seems and is connected to the “elevation” of animal rights that I discussed in my post about veganism in Israel. In that post, I noted how scholars have highlighted the way that animal rights (decoupled from human rights) have become figured as a “pure” ethical issue, simpler and more universal than human rights. What we see here is that the treatment of animals has become characterized as a basic moral intuition that is inherent to humanness: the failure to perform “appropriate” treatment of animals, therefore, demonstrates a lack of moral intuition and, consequently, a defect of humanness. At the same time, questions regarding the “appropriate” treatment of humans have increasingly become viewed as political rather than moral: a question of economics and utility rather than moral intuition and humanness. To endorse animal cruelty, for example animal testing in the cosmetics industry, is immoral and inhuman; to endorse slavery and precarity, for example labor practices in the coffee and chocolate industries, is a political position. I am interested in further investigating how this decoupling has taken place.